


beast of a burden

by lady_laverty



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, F/M, Gen, Human Experimentation, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Memory Alteration, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-30
Updated: 2014-07-30
Packaged: 2018-02-11 01:09:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2047380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_laverty/pseuds/lady_laverty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They build him up by breaking him down. Tick tock goes the clock as they hack and saw at what is already in his head.</p><p><em>Who are you?</em> They ask.</p><p>I don’t know, he replies, over and over until he believes it (he already did) and they do too. Over and over until he is truly nothing but what they wish him to be. A monster. A cold blooded, killing machine.</p><p> </p><p>  <em>Rather: Hydra doesn't like it when you take away their toys. So they take yours.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	beast of a burden

**Author's Note:**

> This is a rewrite of an au that I started earlier a few months ago and I decided to leave it up but start a new one because I felt I couldn't continue it.

_There's a ghost in the mirror_  
 _I'm afraid more than ever_  
 _My feet have led me straight into my grave_  
 _Oh Lord have you walked away?  
_ Paper Route - _Glass Heart Hymn_

 

They build him up by breaking him down. Tick tock goes the clock as they hack and saw at what is already in his head.

 _Who are you?_ They ask.

I don’t know, he replies, over and over until he believes it (he already did) and they do too. Over and over until he is truly nothing but what they wish him to be. A monster. A cold blooded, killing machine.

Was there something before this? (pain, pain, pain, _I wouldn’t like the real you_ )

They pull out something, something vital, and it leaves his mind and they put nothing back. There is nothing exchanged except for a lonely emptiness that leaves him (it, _beast_ ), pliant and childlike.

 _This is the Director of the reformed SHIELD_ , they place a grainy picture in front of him. There is no recognition, nothing, but a spike of something cold in his stomach that is wrong, wrong, wrong. _You must kill him_.

He wants to refuse, for someone to explain to him why he feels the coldness in his stomach. He _wants_. That’s bad.

Bad, bad, bad, you hurt beasts who want, like the bears they have him fight when he is not on mission with the agents and scientists watching. You cage beasts, you hit and kick them, but at least the bears get buried when they’re dead.

Is he dead?

He feels dead, an aching, cracking split down the middle. His metal arm twitches on the bed they have placed him on. Metal arms, metal legs, all the metal for the metal man.

 _Do you feel nothing?_ They ask, poking and prodding and staring and scrubbing.

Yes yes yes.

\----

He is given a rifle, a passport and large amount of American currency. He does not recognise the person in the passport picture. Is it him? He does not know. He has not ever seen himself. On the train from the airport in which he arrived in the country he locks himself in the toilet stall. There is a mirror and a sink and a toilet, of course.

He stares at the person in mirror. He touches the scarred cheek and the angular nose. The dark brown eyes hold nothing and the black hair is cut and fine.

He does not recognise the person in the mirror.

He practices smiling; twitching the muscles in his face like one of the nurses did whenever she saw him when he first woke up. It doesn’t look like hers. It looks stiff and unpliant, like his metal legs get when left outside in the snow for days and days.

It’s fake. Like the passport and the persona he wears.

He’s fake.

He is nothing.

\----

Maybe the nurse will teach him how to smile like she does, when he returns from the mission.

\----

The Director is surprisingly easy to find. He wonders. Is this supposed to occur? Is it supposed to be too easy? He does not know. It makes him nervous. He has staked out the buildings surrounding the base for three days now. Nothing has changed. His routines have not changed.

Director Philip J. Coulson hasn’t changed.

He takes the shot on the fifth day, after watching him through his window, moving about, _living_.

(He misses.)

\----

He is caught, in a hidey hole down an unmemorable street on the east side of the city. This is his rendezvous point with his handlers. No one should know about it other than him. His arms and legs barely fit into the small closet that he hides in when he hears a large amount of footsteps and whispers.

He checks his rounds and counts to ten.

 _We may have found him, sir_ , they whisper. Loud breathing gives away their positions to him and he tenses.

His metal arms are warm and the soft whirring of the gears that keep them moving gives him something to focus on.

The cold feeling in his stomach is back, though.

He thinks he may have a name for it now.

 _Fear_.

\----

The two men speak in heated tones, in a private conference room in a base in the middle of nowhere. One is black and has lost an eye and the other is the leader of one of the most powerful intelligence organisations in the world.

There is a ghost on the pages between them, clogging up the room, choking the leader.

“How did they get him?! He was in one of the most heavily defended prisons in the world. _How_ , Nick, tell me _how?_ ” The leader exclaims, his grip on the paper twisting and ripping.

“I don’t know, cheese, but they did. They managed to pool enough resources together to manage to break in, get him and then get out of the country without being pulled up. They either have a lot of pull or they’re a cell that we haven’t discovered yet.”

The leader stares, stares at the man before him and the man in the picture in front of him.

A part of him is praying that the man in the picture is dead, that the people who broke him out killed him because of his betrayal, but he knows better. Captain Rogers got his best friend back. An exchange had been made.

 _You take from us, we take from you_.

He knows he won’t find what was stolen again.

He can’t find it in himself to cry.

Grant Ward is _gone_.

\----

They shot him with something, something that didn’t hurt but made him woozy. He’s seeing double and his arms are quivering and shorting out. His legs have already given out and they dragged him away. He’s lying in a van, legs chained to the floor and six armed guards with their guns pointed at him.

His arms continue to quiver and short out but he blacks out.

\----

“D.C. how are you feeling?” Skye asks Phil, as Jemma continues to dress and wrap the bullet wound on his arm.

“Like I was just shot,” the bland reply echoed between them.

A silence stretches on, deafening.

\----

A girl and boy are sitting on a bed, yelling and screaming cracking like thunder about them. They huddle under a blanket, the stifling heat from both their bodies making the air heavy to breathe.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Grant?” The girl whispers, carding fingers through inky black mess of hair that flops all over the boy’s head. The only thing their father left them, infinite reminders that he was here and now he’s _gone_.

“I want to be a police man,” he whispers at her, clutching her hand in his tiny one. “I want to protect people. I want to protect you and Dana, from the bad people.”

The girl sobs and clings to her brother, smothering him in her hug.

“I hope you get to be what you want to be, baby, you don’t deserve this life. Neither of us does.”

\----

His mind is awake before his body is, like a full systems check on his arms that keeps him still but aware of everything occurring around him. His breathing is regular and his legs are not twitching. Had the handlers managed to retrieve him and fix his arms? He didn’t know. He didn’t know a lot of things. He lay like this for who knows how long, debating, searching, running through language exercises that were designed to keep his mind busy whilst waiting in a sniper hole to take a shot.

Slowly his body came online, his arms first, the gears whirring slowly and then hastening as they warmed up and were able to work without failure.

“I know you’re awake, soldier. Don’t play games with me.”

He stiffens and his eyes snap open, roaming for enemies. There’s the target again. He shot him, didn’t he? He shot the target. He completed his mission. He didn’t fail.

( _failure means wiping, soldier, do not fail_ )

( _wiping is nothing, nothing, nothing, red hot and freezing cold as it runs across his body_

“All tests show that he is responding well to the techniques used compared to the other subject. Perhaps this is the break we have been waiting for—“

 _no, no, no, no, no, please I’ll be good, I’ll be good—_ )

He failed. He failed failed failed failed—

There’s screaming and screaming, his vision gone in hot white panic. Hands are all over his body, holding him, pinning him to the bed he was placed upon and he fights. His arms groan and squeak as they drag across the steel of the bed frame catching and twisting.

He realises distantly, that he is the one screaming, unintelligibly, in a language he does not remember learning.

“Jesus Christ, someone get me a sedative or something, I can’t work with him like this!” A familiar accent ( _mimicked and mimed, in good nature, the speaker small small small too small to be a threat_ ) arms grip his neck tightly and he feels a needle enter a vein. He gives one last fight for good measure, managing to throw some of them. His vision is returning, slowly, but he feels woozy again, like before. A warm feeling is flowing through his body and he doesn’t like it doesn’t like it—

Faces swim in and out of his vision only a few times before his eyes give in and fall shut, a job well done.

( _Well done, son._ )

\----

Phil paces the control room as the footage continues to show a sleeping Ward. Why did he react so badly? Had they done something to him, in his mind, that he reacted badly to them personally? Or was there something more? He didn’t know, it was all too much. _You didn’t expect to ever see him again_ , his traitorous mind whispers to him, _you hoped you wouldn’t have to_.

Fitzsimmons continue to work on a machine able to control and neutralize the metal arms they had ( _hacked off his real ones_ ) fitted him with. Simmons was still jumpy from his outburst and having to forcibly sedate him, as he screamed and screamed in a language Phil didn’t recognise.

“What do you think they did to him D.C.?” Skye timidly asks, because even with what he had done to them she still cared, he knew, cared about the man who had betrayed them all.

He knew what they did to him. It had been years, but he still remembered being debriefed on what had happened to Bucky Barnes after Hydra decided to make an appearance.

( _Repetitive brainwashing and memory alteration_ , the report had said, _cryogenic suspension for various amounts of time for almost 70 years_.

“They burned away and hid what made me, well, _me_ , sir. Took it out and didn’t give anything back. Only a blank slate with a mission,” Bucky pauses briefly. “I only cared about the mission, until Steve found me, or I found Steve.”

His crooked smile is sad and knowing, his eyes haunted with crimes he doesn’t remember committing. With sins he can’t even being to attempt to repent.)

“They brainwashed him, Skye, reprogrammed him, like one of your computers. He doesn’t know good from bad right now and I don’t know if he ever will again.”

Secretly, he hopes Ward never recovers (he’s a bad man and he knows it, but for this he hopes he doesn’t rot too much in hell) so he doesn’t have to live with the fact that these crimes are on his hands as well or with the fact that he may be broken beyond repair. That he may live as half a person. He hopes.

It’s all he can do.

\----

He dreams of a dog, a boy and a girl.

He dreams of rain and sleet and stinging heat that darkens his skin and makes his hair glow. He dreams of a boy that never really lived, scared of the world and clinging to anybody that was powerful enough to protect him. His body doesn’t have any scars and the girl smiles at him but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

“ _Grant,_ ” the girl calls, her voice sad and lonely, pulling something familiar inside him and he reaches for her, for the comfort that her voice spreads through him. “ _Grant, wake up._ ”

( _He’s crying, the screen in the control room shows, sleeping fitfully and as he does his heart rate doubles and mournful sounds escape his mouth. Another girl is crying, dark hair fanning her shoulders as she sits curled up in front of the monitors._

 _“Grant, I miss you,” she whispers. “Please come back, please.”_ )


End file.
